Harvard’s ‘Kindness’ Pledge

By Christopher Shea

Bloomberg

What could possibly be wrong with asking Harvard students to be nice to one another? This year, freshmen are being asked to make the following pledge:

As we begin at Harvard, we commit to upholding the values of the College and to making the entryway and Yard a place where all can thrive and where the exercise of kindness holds a place on a par with intellectual attainment.

This is not a pledge to refrain from cheating, or to take out the garbage. It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one’s thoughts. Though it refers to sound institutional values affirmed at Commencement, the pledge pretends to affirm them not through the educational process to which the Dean testifies, but through a prior restraint on students’ freedom of thought. A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.

Consider that last sentence. Does the text really say that? Surely there are already people in the Harvard freshman class who believe it is more important to be kind to others than to be incessantly brilliant. Would anyone say that they are breaking the pledge? To say that two values are “on a par” doesn’t imply that one always trumps the other. On the other hand, perhaps it doesn’t say much of anything, which is a problem in itself.

Pledges in general—except anti-cheating pledges, I suppose—are a no-win situation for colleges. They invite either the utterly anodyne (as here, possibly) or controversy (as here, definitely).

Comments (1 of 1)

How very curious this “kindness pledge,” how intellectually and morally bankrupt must be the minds promoting it?

Doubtless, “kindness” is a wonderful concept to promote. However folks may very strongly disagree on just what constitutes “kindness.” For instance, your new roommate can’t seem to make and keep friends. You know the issue is that you clueless roommate has horrendously bad breath. Is it “kind” to tell your roommate, with all the resulting hurt feelings, or to say nothing and thus be “kind” by not hurting feelings but cruel by not helping to solve a potentially easily curable problem? Different folks may have very different opinions.

For this and numerous other sound reasons, many folks feel a very strong revulsion, on principled moral and philosophical grounds, to all such pledges even though they may completely agree with the basic concepts of the particular pledge in question.

So, riddle me this. Just how “kind” is it to attempt to coerce easily intimidated freshmen, through brazen attempts at public humiliation and bullying, to sign a pledge when many find the very notion of all such pledges morally repugnant? As instituted, this whole “kindness pledge” program is, in fact, the very antithesis of “kindness.” It is rank bullying. It demonstrates for the whole world to goggle at just how small minded, dogmatic, intolerant and all around intellectually bankrupt mainstream thought at Harvard has become. This sort of vicious hypocrisy is a fine exemplar of the reason that the value of a Harvard education is becoming so profoundly devalued in the public eye.